I've been away from my little girls for eight days and the it's tested my resolution against guilt. Even though I made the trip to supervise our oldest girl, and I knew in advance I'd have to miss our middle daughter's seventh birthday, I felt sad to be absent. (We scheduled her birthday party before the trip.) The times when someone brought up her birthday were especially painful.
Maybe it's a truism that no matter how confident you are in a decision -- like spending a week one-on-one with an 18-year old the year before she leaves for college -- you still may regret the tradeoffs. Certainly, when I recently missed that same daughter's Valentine's party at school, I felt a twinge of sadness hearing the other parents describe the event. I would make the same choice if I had a do-over, but that didn't keep me from wishing I could be in two places at once.
It's interesting to me that it seems to be in conversation with other adults, especially other parents, that guilt rears its ugly head. They never say anything hurtful, but I imagine what they must be thinking and wonder whether they're judging me. That makes me question my own well-considered decisions. In fact, I hesitated before writing this blog post, for fear that readers would think I'm an awful mom, too.
What do you make of all this? Are you able to make a decision about where to spend your time and not look back or second guess? Or, like the readers who recently commented about working moms angst, is it a continual struggle?
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As a parent of three children, I understand the need to be in several places at the same time and when I have to let go of at least one of those “required” show-ups, I too, feel that twinge you so aptly describe.
The good thing about our heavily scheduled, overly-active lives, is that the guilt usually falls away by the next day, since there is already a new occasion to show up for.
To be honest, the only time I really feel the guilt is when I’m asked to do something at school, or come to a (daytime) school event, and realize that I am really not a part of that aspect of my children’s lives. It’s the moms who are there all the time that invoke the guilt in me – not my working mom colleagues, not my friends (all of whom are working moms), not my fellow travelers on the work-life balance high wire.
I’m writing this from Montreal, far from my home. My 2 kids are at home with their father and I am constantly fighting the guilt. Of course, the day I leave town my baby girl comes down with a fever. So my husband can’t go to work on his last 2 days before starting a new job without searching the globe for someone who can take care of a sick child without infecting everyone else. And now someone who doesn’t know my daughter is taking care of her when she wants her Mommy the most. So yes, I feel guilty. And there’s nothing I can do about it. This is a business trip that happens every 2 years and I have a big presentation to give tomorrow, so I have to suck it up and go on. But if I can move my flight to an earlier time I’m going to do it.